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Listen up!

The School of Music’s Red Hot! Performers are expanding in hopes of bringing more live classical and jazz music to events all over the U’s campus and in the wider Salt Lake City community.

Founded in 2012, the music student soloists and ensembles that make up the Red Hots! have enlivened many U of U advancement events by providing dynamic background accompaniment. Last year, in collaboration with the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, jazz students performed four live concerts at Lassonde Studios, bringing music directly to students an out of traditional concert venues.

And they are not stopping there.

Under new leadership of music graduate student Alison Saporta, and with the support from Fine Arts Fees, the number of Red Hots! appearances you will see will continue to rise. Now in partnership with the Olpin University Union, and the Marriott Library in addition to  Lassonde, you may see drum circles in the Union food court, holiday favorites in the Neeleman Hanger at Lassonde, and early music in the Marriott Library.

Program Coordinator Alison Saporta describes, “Another goal for this upcoming year is to get our Red Hots! Performers to explore performing with all types of artists. For example, if there are dancers that want to perform, perhaps they can perform with vocalists and/or instrumentalists. I think it is important that as musicians and students, we learn how to collaborate with all performers as it brings people together while enhancing artistry and performances.”

They are also available for hire.
So don’t hesitate to add music to your event and jazz it up.

The Red Hots! Program not only exposes new audiences to live music but develops students’ professional skills in the meantime. About the coming year, Saporta says, “Music and art brings everyone together, and with the amazing performers we have at the U, I have no doubt that this will spark a better engagement in the community.”

For more information, visit https://music.utah.edu/community/redhots.php

By Emerging Leaders Ambassador and Guest Writer, Rachel Luebbert

The notes of the saxophone flood the air, quivering like a butterfly’s wings. Then, the piano paints the space in a melodic portrait. The percussion pulses the room with rhythmic vibrations. The music is soft and tender, but at the same time driving and powerful. It demands all of your attention, all of your presence. Suddenly, the trumpet calls out, dancing with new, spontaneous notes and the other instruments follow this line of improvisation as they embark on a new journey. This is jazz music.

On Thursday 2/16 at 7:30PM this jazz music will flood the walls of Libby Gardner Hall during the Jazz Spotlight Concert. Denson Angulo will conduct three different groups; the Jazz Ensemble, a large band of 17 musicians, the Red Hot Jazz Quintet, and the Jazz Repertory with 10 musicians. Each of these students auditioned to be a part of these bands at the beginning of the school year.

John Kim, a fourth year student studying Jazz Bass Performance will be performing with the Jazz Repertory Band on Thursday. Kim explained that this is his first year performing with a larger group, “A big band is a very different experience and my role as a bass player is to be rock solid in time and feel.” The Repertory Band will be performing arrangements created by Kris Johnson, which are standard selections with an added twist of metric modulation and his own flair. The show will also feature exciting sections of improvisation. The Repertory Band, for instance, will transition between order and spontaneity where the improvised sections will be predetermined in length and instrument, yet there will still be a freeness and a sense of play as the musicians create new strands of notes in the moment.

Jazz music runs deep through the veins of the United States. Christopher Kaukali a senior studying Jazz Guitar Performance describes jazz as “the Great American art form”. This music was not adopted from another country but was born on our very soil. John Kim explains a common misconception, “Often people group jazz and classical music into one lump of ‘historical music’. However, jazz music is the music of our past as Americans. It is a never-ending protest. More than ever, it is important to not forget what this music is saying.” So come to the Jazz Spotlight Concert, to play an active role in keeping Jazz alive and continuing the never-ending protest for social justice and individual expression.

Date: 2/16 at 7:30PM
Location: Libby Gardner Hall
Tickets: UofU Students tickers are free with ArtsPass (Ucard), Other Students are $3, General Admission is $9, UofU Faculty, Staff, and Seniors are $3.

Coffee with Creatives is a monthly series hosted by the Arts Entrepreneurship program at Lassonde Studios that brings creative professionals from all around to speak to students about how they have succeeded in the creative industry professionally, or how their arts background plays into their work.

This falls in line with the Arts Entrepreneurship goals to provide programming that sits at the intersection of arts and industry. We want to teach creatives about all the opportunities they have ahead of them, and teach entrepreneurs how to endow more creative spirit in their work. So for those looking for a jolt of inspiration with their morning coffee, Coffee with Creatives is the way to go.

Coffee with Creatives dates:

• Film and Media Arts Professors, Sonia and Mirriam Sobrino, on 2/24 at 10AM located in the Neeleman-hangar
• Assistant Dean for Art & Creative Engagement, ED of UtahPresents, Brooke Horejsi, on 3/23 at 10AM in Lassonde Studios.

By Emerging Leaders Ambassador and Guest Writer Rachel Luebbert

From February 2nd-17th the Gittins Gallery featured a collaborative exhibition organized by Assistant Professor in Sculpture Intermedia, Wendy Wisher, and Associate Professor in Computer Science, Erik Brunvand. This exhibition brought together six researchers from different departments at the University of Utah surrounding the discussion of the significance of water in the Western US.

The spirit of this exhibition was inspired by a collaboration that occurred 50 years ago. In 1966, Bell Laboratories funded 10 artists, dancers, musicians, and engineers for “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineer” in New York. This marked the first large-scale collaboration between artists and engineers. Similarly, Liquid Collaboration serves as a collaborative anniversary and highlights an effort to foster new relationships.

The goal of Wendy Wisher and Erik Brunvard was to create an installation that was truly collaborative, unlike other projects that have just hired another partner to do the coding. Wisher explained, “We made a piece that is at first glance an installation that presents visual and audio components about water. But in a deeper way, it’s about how people need to come together and collaborate to solve these large and complex problems.” In their installation, Collective Currents, viewers came together and collaborated within the exhibition. Bronze casts of hands mark each side of the installation and viewers had to physically create a human chain, a sort of circuit. This physical collaboration caused the distant, garbled water sounds to become the babbling of fast flowing water, while the video fragments began to connect together to create a comprehensible video picture. The water depicted transitions from oily blackness to an imperfect cleanness. Wisher described this symbolism, “When we try to restore our water, it will never go back to its initial state and it cannot fully be returned to perfection.” However, through such collaborative work, we can come together to ensure that we have access to clean water.

In the piece Casual Nexus, Artist Tatiana Larsen and Computer Scientist Peter Jensen created a large suspended sculpture, which consists of a large, central, transparent sphere connected to six smaller spheres. The water level constantly changed responding to the number of people in the gallery as well as their distance to the piece. This installation inspired conversations regarding how draining water from one water source can affect other water sources negatively.

The third and final work, Words are Water is a multimedia installation with Tim Grant’s audio and Justin Watson’s visuals. The video is built on purely sonic and visual experiences connected to water— the viewer then constructed their own narrative without any specific voiceover or text. This installation uses drinking water and audio sourced from glaciers to discuss the mutually destructive effect of not preserving water.

Liquid Collaboration raised important environmental questions and challenged viewers to recognize their own role in the matter of Water in the West.

*Liquid Collaboration was funded by URC and the College of Fine Arts